Raspberry Pi 2 crashes due to camera flash

According to users, the new Raspberry Pi 2 suffers from photosensitivity. For example, camera flashes and possibly laser pointers cause the development board to crash. All other models don’t seem to suffer from light crashes.

The problems have been reported on the Raspberry forum. A number of users have confirmed that they can reproduce the crashes and a Raspberry Pi engineer also confirmed the problems. From the posted experiences, it appears that the Raspberry Pi 2 no longer functions as soon as light is shone on it. Xenon camera flashes, among other things, cause the sign to crash. One of the users on the forum states that pointing a laser pointer at the motherboard also causes problems.

According to the makers of the Raspberry boards, the smps chip is probably the culprit. This is necessary to regulate the voltage. Measurements show that flashes of light can cause the voltage on the sign to briefly fail, which is likely to cause the crashes. It is still unclear whether the makers plan to solve the problems.

Last week, the new Raspberry Pi 2 was announced. The board should perform better than previous models. Built-in is a quad-core Broadcom BCM2836 soc with four ARMv7 Cortex-A7 cores and a clock speed of 900MHz. The board can run Windows 10, among other things.